Studio's 'Ride' Drives Home a Family's Pain

Kevin Bergen in "The Long Christmas Ride Home." The puppet represents his character, Stephen, as a child. (By Carol Pratt -- Studio Theatre)

To convey fully the powerlessness of children, Paula Vogel comes up with an illuminating strategy in "The Long Christmas Ride Home." She makes them puppets.

In the playwright's melancholy drama, exquisitely mounted by Studio Theatre, three life-size dolls manipulated by a small army of puppeteers are crowded into the back seat of an imaginary Rambler. The children's parents -- portrayed by flesh-and-blood actors -- sit in front, doing their utmost to ensure that the visit to Grandmother's house is an unmitigated disaster.

The strange thing is that as the holiday's traumatizing catastrophes multiply, your eye shifts protectively to the puppets' faces. Irrationally, you scan their frozen features for some sign of how these figurative blows are being received. And of course, as is often the case with the internalized suffering of the very young, blankness is all you get in return.

Yuletide revelers should not be misled. Although the play's slant ultimately is reaffirming, this is a seasonal offering in title only. Kids, siblings, fellow travelers in pain: These are the characters who form the nexus of Vogel's short play.

The story, of an American family in crisis, is of a sort with which you will be very familiar. But even if "The Long Christmas Ride Home" goes where many other plays have gone before, the playwright's inventive approach and questing, conciliatory spirit bestow much originality and some consequence.

Vogel, author of the Pulitzer-winning "How I Learned to Drive," is inspired by personal tragedy (as in her life, the brother in her story dies of AIDS-related causes) and an array of theatrical sources. Japan is a motif: The piece incorporates elements of Noh drama as well as bunraku puppetry. Thornton Wilder is another inspiration, as the central character of the brother -- voiced as a puppet and played as a grownup by the excellent Kevin Bergen -- revisits the world after his death in "Our Town" fashion.

Those facets are not as arbitrarily woven together as they might sound. Wilder was said himself to have been influenced by the starkness of Noh drama, in which a ghost character recalling life on Earth is a common figure. (The death of a loved one is also a regular Noh theme.) And the brother, Stephen, expresses an affinity for the stylized serenity of classical Japanese art, so the play feels at times like an elegy for Stephen and his eye for beauty.

Daniel Conway's elegant set is an illustration of that. With the rendering of a simple Japanese structure and behind it a sloping bridge extending from one wing of the Metheny Stage to the other, Conway offers up an environment pleasing in its symmetry and spareness. It's a wintry landscape, well suited to cold contemplation. Accompaniment by Sumie Kaneko on Japanese string and percussion instruments adds yet another dimension to the contrasts here between esoteric forms and harsher realities.

Chilliness defines the family on this Christmas journey on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. (of which Vogel is a native). As we learn from the parents -- who narrate each other's stories as if the sordid details were etched on each of their icy souls -- Father has been cheating on Mother for ages. (As dad and mom, Paul L. Nolan and Laura Giannarelli bring a brutal, cutting honesty to a sterile partnership.) And on this especially tumultuous Christmas, the tension between them flares up with a vengeance.

This initial chain of events is dramatically the play's strongest. Director Serge Seiden, aided by puppetmaker Aaron Cromie's superb creations (he was also responsible for the puppets in Folger Theatre's delightful "Measure for Measure"), skillfully orchestrates the interplay among his mixed cast of inanimate and animate performers. At any time, as many as six people are working the three child puppets; other puppets will emerge, as children in a Christmas pageant and as assorted adults engaged in, among other things, some X-rated escapades. At all times, the puppetry is integrated seamlessly.

The play jumps abruptly into the young adulthood of the three children, now played by the actors who had been lead puppeteers for the children: Bergen, Kate Debelack and Tonya Beckman Ross. The complexities of their lives no longer are so easily encapsulated by glazed puppet stares. Vogel gives each of them a parallel scene, in which he or she stands outside the door of a lover's house, begging to be let back in. The linkage suggests a bond beyond blood, forged in a lifetime of back-seat pain.

The playwright makes no effort to tie these strands into conclusive bows, and that is a good thing; the play instead takes another leap, into Stephen's afterlife, on a day when he is granted the chance to return to Earth and check up on the family members to whom he's drawn closest. This gesture brings a final, consoling warmth to "The Long Christmas Ride Home," the feeling that the griefs of childhood can be borne, if never forgotten.

The Long Christmas Ride Home, by Paula Vogel. Directed by Serge Seiden. lighting, Michael Giannitti; costumes, Devon Painter; sound, Erik Trester; choreography, Dana Tai Soon Burgess. With Emmy Bean, Courtney Bell, Lucas Maloney, Betsy Rosen, Ben Russo, Michael C. Wilson. About 90 minutes. Through Dec. 31 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Call 202-332-3300 or visit http://www.studiotheatre.org.